


The Light Where Adam's Rib Was

by willowbilly



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Dark Imagery, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Home Invasion, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Introspection, Late Night Conversations, Like Really Excessively Purple, Murder Husbands, Murder Wives, Parenthood, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Purple Prose, Reconciliation, Reunions, Unexpected Visitors, Violently Violet Prose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-10-16 02:47:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10562133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: Margot's breathing was a damp fluttering of soft heat against Alana's wrist, and though she couldn't see it Alana knew that Margot was staring off into the dark, unblinking, with that peculiar crocodilian opacity glazing the sea-glass green of her eyes. It seemed a long time before Margot moved to mold her soft, dry lips against Alana's knuckles and then release her hand so that she could slide her palm flat against Alana's stomach, fingers outstretched, pressing slightly as if she wanted to sink into Alana's body, wanted to touch the pulsing, velvety-wet viscera packed so neatly within.“I trust you,” Margot had murmured, and from that Alana was made to understand that Margot had never trusted anyone else as she did Alana, and that, before Alana, she'd thought she never would.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fatal_drum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal_drum/gifts).



> So this is my very late contribution to Fandom Trumps Hate for the unparalleled [fatal_drum](https://fataldrum.tumblr.com/), who, besides being an _amazing_ [writer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal_drum/pseuds/fatal_drum), is an awesome person who's been nothing but patient, good-humored, and encouraging, and just so happened to have a mighty need for some Marlana! And then I was dumb enough to try throwing a smidge of plot in. So. Ta da.
> 
> *~*~ ¡FUCK DRUMPF! ~*~*

Margot, Alana thinks, is careful not to know her own strength. She never finds the end of it.

This is a dry heat. Maryland would always seem to have more humidity the higher the mercury climbed, sometimes so thick it felt like the weight of damp feathers on the skin, but here every microscopic drop of moisture feels sucked out of the air beneath the blinding swelter of the midsummer sun and its bald blue sky. It shines through the wide wicker brim of Alana's sunhat in dazzling dapples, UV rays seeking warm skin, sweat making her sunglasses slip a little down her nose with the rolling steps of the horse beneath her. It's a good day, good enough to risk tackling the rigors of a saddle so she can accompany Margot on her afternoon ride; the twinge in her spine isn't agonizing but merely sharply uncomfortable.

It's for this reason that Margot put her on the steady chestnut gelding, the one with the smoothest gait, and kept the feistier gray stallion for herself. He has as many muscles as a Michelangelo painting and likes to break into a jarring trot without warning, all arching neck and stomping hooves, a failed dressage horse with all the talent but none of the discipline. Margot always eases him back with a calm, authoritative hand, unyielding as iron but never cruel, never even startled. She said once that she likes a little headstrong liveliness in her mount. Nurtures it as proof of spirit, unbroken. Soul untamed.

Alana's always been a creature of evolution. Adapting to stressors. Even when hardening her heart and cladding herself in the cold armor of ruthlessness it was a reaction to betrayal. An excising of her own compassionate gullibility, a calculated rebirth, whereas Margot seems as though she's always remained fundamentally unchanged, a surface riddled with brittle cracks keeping safe an indomitable core buried unreachably deep within, adamant endurance holding her together right from her very conception in a womb already poisoned by the miasma of her predecessor. And yet they are, the both of them, survivors. Ineffably identical.

“Head in the clouds?” Margot calls, pulling up alongside her. The massive gray gives her almost half a foot on Alana, and she sways in easy synchronization with him, long braid swinging free down her tanned back, sharp, knife-sculpted shoulder blades and the straight line of her spine bared by her halter top. A fine layer of dirt is just beginning to collect over the high shine of her black riding boots, and Alana allows her gaze to linger a touch along the flex of Margot's thighs beneath the sinfully sleek, formfitting cloth of her breeches on the way back up to her face, and then further up, to the sky.

“It would be if there were any clouds to be had,” Alana says.

Margot tips her head back to likewise consider the spotless blue above them, raising a hand to shade her eyes and peering between the cracks of her fingers, sunlight falling in warped stripes over her face as she squints. This is her relaxed, with neither threat nor expectation trapping her beneath the boot heel of a predetermined, oppressive role. She seems more saturated with color than when they first met, out here in the open air, magnetically hale and vibrant, the pinch of her large, expressive eyes and the new tawny undertone to her complexion, the unguarded looseness to her limbs and the casual slept-in sloppiness of her braid, all imparting a nagging impression of feral confidence.

“Would you look at that. Not a one,” Margot drawls thoughtfully, before drawing herself back down and taking up the reins with both hands again as the gray tries to take advantage of her preoccupation to speed up. Alana laughs at the seeming jauntiness of his attempt, the snort and shake of his head as his rider effortlessly regains control.

It's something to behold when Margot dons her helmet and takes him through the course at full speed, lifted off the saddle and bent over his neck, petite and dark against the pale, dappled bulk of her eager would-be warhorse, poised so lightly it seems as though she may take flight at any moment; a streamlined peregrine folding into a stoop. One time the gray's neck rammed into her chin as she had him make a leap and Alana's heart stopped until the gray came to a halt and she saw Margot uncurl from her defensive position of pain, gingerly palpating her chin as she dismounted. She'd had a livid, puffy splotch of a bruise which didn't fade for weeks and she would grin every time Alana stared at it for too long in concern, would gasp when Alana kissed and bit at it. Refused to cover it with makeup, as though she were proud.

An old baby-blue pickup trundles rounds the bend ahead of them and Alana falls behind Margot as they sidle single-file to the right side of the dirt road, leaving the left clear for the truck to pass. It's the same color as the sky, like a piece of it broke free and transformed from two-dimensional into three, the interior a cockpit of shadow cutouts. There's a familiarity which strikes Alana out of nowhere when she sees the driver's arm draped out the open window, the particular angle his hand lifts at when he sends them a polite, perfunctory wave of acknowledgment, but then he's passing them and the cloud of dust and hot wind in the vehicle's wake has risen over her, pushing it out of her mind.

She pulls a crisp cotton handkerchief from her pocket and covers her mouth and nose until the air is clear again.

“A little farther?” Margot asks, bringing the gray over to pace in a circle around Alana's chestnut, grinning hopefully.

“Shark,” Alana remarks, laughing, twisting in the saddle to watch her and then pressing her knuckles into the stab of pain in her lower back as if to push it back in and hold it in place. “I'll last at least another quarter mile before I'll have to head back.”

“Homebody,” Margot volleys in return, because they've talked with each other, about how Alana wants Margot to disregard the limits her body's injury puts on her, how she'd rather Margot tease her than flutter over her in concern, and because Margot craves the openness and solitude of the outdoors with a strength Alana can't always understand, probably has ever since long horse rides were the only thing which would let her stay out for hours in the quasi-safety of the wooded side of the Verger estate and away from the toxic bosom of her family's mansion.

“You're free to go on alone, you know,” Alana says.

“No I'm not,” Margot says, affectionately dismissive, and nothing else.

 

~~~

 

Morgan runs up to them after Applesauce when they finally get back, his clumsy sprint easily outstripped that of their overexcited dog's, a sheet of paper flapping in his hand and the tutor trailing sedately after them both.

He's drawn them a family portrait, all three of them together in crayon and watercolor, holding hands and smiling. Margot hoists him onto her hip and exclaims in suitably impressed tones as she pores over every detail of his art, bouncing him higher every now and then to keep him from slipping as Applesauce circles around them, tongue lolling and claws clicking as she slowly settles down. Morgan's getting too large to hold up for long, now, his legs dangling down past Margot's knees and the hems of his pants hiked up to reveal his meticulously turned-down socks, rolled carefully in half above the matte salmon-pink Mary Janes he'd selected himself after wandering into the girl's aisle of the shoe store and which they'd bought despite the apparently offended sensibilities of the clerk and her sputtering defense of gendered clothing, her argument swiftly and mercilessly overturned.

Alana cards her hand through Morgan's hair and he tips his head back to look at her upside down, making sure that she's paying attention, seeking approval and beaming when he sees it in her face. Bright and uncomplicated. He takes after Alana, an intelligent, sensitive, and somewhat serious child, and whenever he sees either of them after they've been gone even a short time he seems to glow with enthusiasm. Always creating, always reaching for connection.

The day Morgan was born and she handed him to Margot for the first time, and Margot stared and stared, reverent tears welling in her eyes as if she were witness to a miracle, was the happiest moment of Alana's life.

“I can't help but half-believe we've planted the seed of our own destruction,” Margot had said one night, soon after the insemination, her head resting on the as-yet flat plane of Alana's stomach, the fall of her hair tickling Alana's side and her ear to Alana's flesh as though listening for the fitful slumber of blossoming fetal life.

“Destruction isn't so far off from salvation,” Alana mused, not quite reassuringly. “Just look what we did to get here.”

Margot scraped her nails up in a curve along Alana's ribs, a little harder with each pass, going from ticklish to stinging. “I'll never regret having done it. I'd do it again. I _will_ do it again, if I have to.”

“And if it comes to that I'll help you. But it won't.” She stilled Margot's hand, lacing their fingers together and pulling them over to rest beside Margot's cheek. “Because this child is ours. Not Mason's. Not anyone's but ours, _our_ baby, _our_ little boy, and he'll never, _ever_ get ahold of him now.”

Margot's breathing was a damp fluttering of soft heat against Alana's wrist, and though she couldn't see it Alana knew that Margot was staring off into the dark, unblinking, with that peculiar crocodilian opacity glazing the sea-glass green of her eyes. It seemed a long time before Margot moved to mold her soft, dry lips against Alana's knuckles and then release her hand so that she could slide her palm flat against Alana's stomach, fingers outstretched, pressing slightly as if she wanted to sink into Alana's body, wanted to touch the pulsing, velvety-wet viscera packed so neatly within.

“I trust you,” Margot had murmured, and from that Alana was made to understand that Margot had never trusted anyone else as she did Alana, and that, before Alana, she'd thought she never would.

Trust. That's what she sees so unwaveringly in their son whenever he sees them and smiles. That's what Alana and Margot's relationship is built on, its foundation that first leap of faith, their alliance in the face of shared opposition. Trust in each other and in the future. In the belief that they _have_ a future, that their sins and past missteps won't catch up to them and cut the threads of their fate short with an indifferent snip of golden shears.

Existence, love... all tenuous, sometimes fleeting things. But, Alana thinks, studying the crude but whimsical simplicity of Morgan's domestic tableau... well worth the hope.

 

~~~

 

She wakes to Applesauce barking stridently from the garage and Morgan's small hand insistently shaking her shoulder and his face very close to hers as he whispers over the hypnotically echoing music of the ambient electronica sleep CD drifting softly from the master bedroom's sound system, a harsh urgency in his high, piping voice: _“Mom, there's someone in the dining room.”_

Alana's blood instantly runs cold with adrenaline, a sensation like ice water rushing through her veins all the way from her prickling scalp to her toenails, and in a burst of movement she kicks the covers from the bed entirely, fumbling for the smartphone on the nightstand and shoving it against Margot's chest as she rouses beside them, still flailing after the sheets, half-asleep. Alana also summarily shoves Morgan against Margot's chest as soon as she's upright and has caught the phone, blinking owlishly in the dim near-dawn light, but even as she clutches Morgan to her she does not scream, doesn't make any sound of terror at all. Fear is too familiar a companion to disrupt her composure.

“Call help and get to the panic room,” Alana orders, a sharp hiss with barely any breath behind it, and then Margot _does_ try to say something, makes a grab for Alana's arm but Alana tears herself free and slips from the bed and out the door, her feet light over the carpet and her fingertips buzzing. She has to remind herself not to hold her breath, sprints on her tiptoes to the entryway to retrieve Morgan's metal baseball bat when she realizes the handgun is still locked in the safe in the master bedroom. She should go back and get it. Should go lock herself in the panic room with her family after getting it, wait for the _polic_ _í_ _a_ in relative safety.

But she knows who it is. The only person it would be. And her traitorous feet carry her without conscious will to the doorway of the dining room, palms sweating around the grip of the baseball bat as she lifts it over her shoulder, ready, her steps faltering as she rounds the corner and comes to a dumbfounded stop right there, in full view, no advantage of surprise and no attack, because there he is. Back from the dead after all, straightening from the row of white candles he's finished lighting on the dining table and smiling warmly at her as he shakes out the match with a graceful, absent flick and sets it down. Marking her focus, he extends his arms parallel to the table, hands palm-up and his elbows crooked down so as to hold them slightly bowed in a calculated pose of benevolent iconoclasm, the graciously inclined carriage of his head a perfect mimicry of a humble saint's.

“It is good to see your bravery is as unhampered by wisdom as ever, Alana,” Hannibal says, and even with bleached hair hacked close to his scalp and a full, grizzled silver beard obscuring his jaw, the cold, deep pits of his eyes are exactly the same, as is his voice, a deep tide of thunder poetry resonating in the worn and torn calcifications of her battered battle-scarred bones.

He's on the other side of the room, the table between them. She raises the bat, swiveling to present a smaller target area as she chokes up on the grip and scans for any sign of a weapon on his person and finds none, sucks in air to say something.

“Backhanded compliment, much?” Will chides from Hannibal's side, and Alana flinches, hard, words dying in her throat at _his_ voice as well, at how she hadn't seen him behind Hannibal at all until he spoke, swathed as he is in the tremendous cloak of Hannibal's shadow. He's turned away, tracing the shape of the bronze stag statue gleaming on the side table beside him, his fingertips pattering in a little nervous dance over the antler tines. His hand is just far enough out beyond Hannibal's shadow to catch the candlelight, and it suddenly seems like those, the very tips of his fingers, are the only parts of him which are solid, the only things anchoring him here. An apparition so tenuously tethered to the realm of the corporeal that he threatens to slip silently away with nary a sigh of effort at any moment.

Rather like the dubious persistence of Alana's continued wellbeing in Hannibal's presence.

The bodyguards have yet to appear, and while the private security they employ is valued for discretion this would be pushing it. Either they've been paid off or they're dead.

Probably dead.

“You didn't call ahead,” Alana says.

“Sorry,” says Will, actually managing to come across as somewhat abashed. Hannibal lowers his arms, leans forward to splay his fingertips on the table and rest his weight on them. This, worryingly, puts him in position to vault straight over the table towards her should he so desire. Alana decides to visualize his face as a baseball should worst come to worst. “We just wanted a chance to talk to you.”

“And that's all you want to do?” Alana asks. She's trying not to let her knees lock in case she needs to run but they feel shaky already, unsteady as a newborn fawn's. Her sweaty hands are starting to itch from how tightly they're clenched, the way dead, moist things deprived of air dream of rot. “Talk?”

Will tilts his head, and then turns it sharply, zeroing in on Margot as she comes through the doorway with her arms up in a textbook-perfect isosceles stance, on the flashy, malevolent gleam of the nickel-plated revolver coming up to aim at Hannibal.

Alana sees Hannibal tense in preparation, readying himself to leap, and the gun seems very close by, so close that she can note with an oddly detached hyper-clarity that the hammer is cocked, that Margot's knuckles are standing out against her skin, that she's squeezing the trigger, millimeters away from firing into Hannibal's chest. In the strained corner of her eye Will moves, grabbing the neck of the stag statue and hefting it in a brutally short, economic arc.

Alana makes another instinctive, foolhardy decision.

She drops the bat and takes urgent hold of Margot's wrist, transferring her moment of restraint into Margot, and Margot hesitates just enough to ease up on the trigger as the base of the statue connects with a solid thunk to the back of Hannibal's head.

The bat hits the fine hardwood floor with a hollow clang, Hannibal crumpling into an ignominious heap immediately afterwards. There is no gunshot.

Margot, otherwise completely still, uncurls her finger from the trigger to instead rest it straight alongside the guard.

Applesauce has fallen quiet, listening to their voices.

“Again, sorry for dropping by unannounced,” Will says, into the stiff pall of silence. He lowers the stag onto the table, lining its thick pedestal base up carefully with the discarded match. Its high bronze head gazes out at the dining room with dumb serenity. After a moment of consideration Will picks the charred match up and slides it into his shirt pocket for absolutely no discernible reason. He can't be _that_ low on fresh matches. “Do you have any duct tape? Maybe in the kitchen under the sink?” His speculation as to where the Verger-Bloom household may store their duct tape carries a strong intimation that he has, on prior occasions, had cause to go rooting through strangers' homes in search of something with which to tie people up. Best not to dwell.

“Silk rope in the bedroom,” Alana offers.

 _“Silk_ rope?”

“We're a young, affectionate couple with a dynamic and fulfilling love life,” says Alana, without missing a beat, brain-to-mouth filter nowhere to be found. She doesn't... _think_ she meant that as a joke, but she's reverted into some kind of professorial oversharing, nothing to hold back her analytical intellect from spilling brute honesty from an unguarded tongue, defenses razed. Her brain feels like it wants to leak out her mouth, her heart likewise liquefied, a magma jumble of intense not-quite-relief, dire dread transmuted into a no less debilitating, shivery sort of suspense. She doesn't know how she's standing.

 _“Silk._ And... _no_ duct tape?” He sounds more disbelievingly scandalized at the lack of the tape than at the presence of the rope.

“Silk,” Alana confirms.

Will makes a flicking gesture of either apology or dismissal. Hannibal groans from beneath the table, sign enough of trouble to incentivize Alana's swift retrieval of the rope.

She knocks on the hidden panic room door at the back of the closet before she leaves the bedroom, rapping out the pattern for _Caution, stay hidden._

A diminutive fist taps more quietly back: _Okay. Be safe._

 _Love you,_ Alana adds, knuckles stinging against wood paneling, layered as it is over several inches of tempered steel. She rips herself away before she can listen for Morgan's reply.

Upon her return Will is fiddling uneasily with the tie holding his hair up in its haphazard bun and Margot has not moved an inch, her arms trembling with strain. Though she finally uncocks the hammer and keeps her finger from the trigger as Alana moves into range she does not take her eyes off of their intruders, seems barely even to blink, her stare wide and hard and empty as a doll's even as Will helps Alana to hoist Hannibal into a chair and hold his drowsy body in place as she secures him to it, hands, wrists, arms, legs, and torso all webbed in expert, intricate knot work, wrinkling his suit. She's half-certain he's started playing possum at some point, and she fumbles numbly over the rope in anticipation of a sudden burst of force, dreading an inevitable counterattack, but, wonder of wonders, Hannibal is either truly unconscious or complying with Will's not-so-subtle wishes and allows her to tie him down.

“You didn't call for help?” Alana asks Margot, as she's finishing up. She starts to check that the bindings are loose enough not to chafe or cut off circulation on autopilot care but recoils when she feels the first static-electric shock of Hannibal's skin beneath her fingers, revoltingly normal, human. She's not ready to acknowledge the offensive reality of his palpable physical presence yet.

Margot takes a long time to answer, and when she finally does her voice is detached, remote. “I figured it'd be easier to dispose of any corpses without law enforcement sniffing around.”

“Ah,” Alana says.

“Smart,” Will adds approvingly, leaning an unsympathetic arm on Hannibal's shoulder to support his weight as Hannibal groans with ceremonial piteousness and begins to make a punctilious show of rousing.

Alana's foot bumps against the bat as she rounds the table to retake her place at Margot's side, nudging it into a gentle roll. When she bends down to pick it up it's as if the pin in her spine was zapped with a live wire; she categorically should not have jumped out of bed and run around as she had. She has to resort to propping the heel of her hand against the small of her back as she levers herself up with all the sprightliness of an ancient crone, using the bat as a makeshift cane, the third leg in a rickety tripod. She despises this moment of inelegance, this lack of poise, before she regains herself.

“Your swing was perhaps a tad harder than necessary, was it not, my dear?” Hannibal asks Will after a few labored moments, wincing, his chin still drooping onto his chest and his brow furrowed with pain. It is possible he may not be entirely faking his distress.

Will scrubs a rough hand over Hannibal's cropped hair, ruffling it over his injury and causing Hannibal to flinch away. Will's touch immediately goes softer in response, combing almost apologetically over his scalp. The easy physical contact is almost unnerving, instigated as it is by Will, a person Alana had only ever known to be repulsed by human nearness unless under extreme emotional duress, but here he is treating Hannibal like an unavoidable symbiotic entity, an extension of his own body too inextricably close and melded to himself to have any boundaries to respect or any otherness to defend against. “Snap decision. Darling.” The endearment thrown in as a call-and-response rebuke of Hannibal's own. “The important thing is to prove we're not a threat.”

“An impossible aim,” Margot says venomously. _Still_ statue-still; Margot Verger-Bloom, _Resolute Woman In Silk Slip With Handgun,_ 2017, marble, 64 inches, On loan from Valhalla.

“Fair,” Will concedes. “But. Like I said, we're here to talk. Not to kill you. We want to clear things up and put your concerns to... rest.”

“The way you put Dr. Du Maurier to rest?” Alana asks, as she meant to earlier. The woman had dropped off the face of the planet, house spotless of forensics, belongings all scrupulously in place, clothes in drawers and food in the fridge and doors locked. Her disappearance had prompted a brief resurgence in Lecter-related conspiracy theories and had put Alana and Margot on guard for a while, but months passed and the furor died down and Alana and Margot relaxed, laid their fears to rest.

Graham and Lecter were doubtlessly dead, after all. And what need have the living for fear of the dead?

 _Zombies,_ chirps some obnoxious, intruding little voice in the back of her mind. She duly strangles it.

“Bedelia was a different case,” Will says.

“How?” Alana demands levelly.

 _“I_ wanted her dead,” Will replies, just as levelly.

As one, Alana and Margot look at Hannibal.

He looks back with a beatific smile upon his lips, and, after a moment, his eyebrows twitch upwards with salacious, meaningful precision.

Alana feels her own lips twist in revulsion.

She'd tried for so long to uphold the highest possible standard of ethics. Her field, she'd felt, required a barrier of morality to keep oneself in check, to protect one's charges against exploitation, to help oneself to fight off the temptation to dig a little too deeply into another's mind or willfully misinterpret facts and wrongfully influence subjects, needed a code keep oneself from the sort of oily, self-aggrandizing intellectual corruption which Chilton so heavily favored in every garishly daring line of his journal publications and later, lurid books. She'd fancied herself a bastion, her gut feelings of right and wrong her lodestone as she viewed the world through optimistically rose-tinted lenses while pragmatically holding tight to reality, a balancing act at which she strove to excel. She'd been adamant in this pursuit, outraged when others strayed from the path of the just on which she walked, but forgiving of those who realized they erred, and sorrowful, not spiteful, of those stubborn souls who failed to repent even in the face of all her efforts.

She'd been a force for change. Righteous, yet loving. Good at reading people. Her first impressions were rarely far off, and she found it easy to bond with others. Too easy, sometimes, as it was with Will, but she always considered herself objective and practical enough to distance herself again if needs must. Able to keep things cordial. Professional. _Pleasant._

Perhaps above all, she'd been loyal.

Loyal to those first, and in one case, fatally mistaken, impressions. Loyal to her own sense of enlightenment. Loyal to her hubris, to her misplaced trust, to the concept of a good and honest friend; loyal, almost, unto death.

One constructive thing to have come out of utter disillusionment: she was a free agent now, a clear-eyed mercenary serving only herself and her immediate beloveds and whatever incarnation of justice best suits her whims. There's no longer any need for her to curb her silent censure or her morbid fascination, to keep the temperature of her heart solicitously heated to at least lukewarm and her curiosity conscientiously confined to first gear as she floats down from on high to dispense her insistent, one-track wisdom and while holding herself back from shaking the ignorant by the shoulders and screaming in their faces as they _disregard her,_ as she is dismissed despite all her politeness and confidence and intelligence, all that shit she told herself to cling to again and again proven all for naught.

Fuck it. Sometimes she's wrong, and some other times people aren't _worth_ convincing.

Or, in other words: Alana is not nice anymore.

“So Will's the one wearing the pants in the relationship,” she says, scornfully sharp, a baited hook.

Hannibal affects patronizingly lofty disappointment. “Being a woman in a relationship with another woman yourself, Alana, as well as being highly educated in social mores and pejoratives pertaining to gender and sexuality, I would have hoped that you would know better than to indulge in the application of false heteronormative standards to queer relationships which are by their very nature and definition exempt from such. This is, of course, not even taking into consideration the sexism and _cis_ sexism inherent in an idiom which implies that traditionally masculine clothing and by extension behavior determi—”

New tack. “Shut up and tell me exactly why Will doesn't wish us dead and why you'd listen to him or Margot is going to shoot you.” Margot dips her chin at Alana's clipped interruption of Hannibal's attempted soapboxing, sharp and assenting.

He regards them thoughtfully for a long moment, tormented by some powerful, petty inner temptation, lips pursing slowly in the manner of a man whose restraint is about to fail him in favor of being a smugly obtuse little shit.

“Shut up,” he asks with infernal innocence, eyes twinkling, “or tell you? I cannot reasonably be expected to simultaneously accomplish both.”

The revolver's double-action, so cocking back the hammer is a convenience, not a prerequisite, to firing. Margot therefore only needs to bother with slipping her index finger in place against the trigger before she's advancing with swift, menacing strides, halting and visibly refraining from committing violence upon Hannibal's person only because she's neared too close to the table to comfortably retain her strategic advantage. And, perhaps, because Will just as swiftly yanks Hannibal's chair back from the other side so as to give himself enough room to bodily insert himself between Hannibal and Margot's line of fire, the maneuver brisk and businesslike and hard enough to make the candles gutter and to seemingly give Hannibal whiplash, Will's mouth a sour, resignedly put-upon line.

 _“He'll_ do the shutting up,” he says, half promise and half threat, “I'll do the telling.”

“Yeah, that sounds best,” Margot agrees tersely.

Hannibal tips his head back and rolls his neck with a rueful smirk and an audible crack of vertebrae, his Adam's apple standing out like a knot of wood from the sinuous chestnut arch of his throat.

Alana becomes acutely and sickeningly aware that she's felt that Adam's apple beneath her lips, the bobbing undulation of it when he swallowed. The memory, as it always does, inflames her with subzero fury, her gorge rising.

It had taken every last ounce of her willpower not to strap him into an electric chair for that once he'd been given over to her loving custody at the BSHCI, repercussions be damned; everything in her not to jab a lethal needle into his arm for the tender, attentive ministrations he'd lavished on her, the long, fluid, knowing thrusts of his hips, for having the cunning temerity to touch her with the irrevocably sullied, blood-wet stain of his lying cannibal's mouth. But by then she'd already had her revenge; him, bereft of freedom, at her mercy. That was all she'd fought for, stooped so low for: recompense by way of power, as personal and intimate a violation as had been inflicted upon her, the security in knowing the key to her nightmare monster's pretty little cage was in her own capable hand.

Until he'd had the gall to slip away and “die.”

The twisted tangles of attraction and manipulation and consent bind all four of them together, chafing and ugly.

She still remembers how sweet and desperate Will had been when they'd kissed. How he'd been frayed down into nothing but soft, exhausted edges and frazzled static-electric sparks of neuroticism, the night he'd heard a nonexistent animal scratching and crying inside his chimney and thought to call her, and how close she'd been to giving in and taking what he offered, letting him use her as a crutch if only for the fleeting reward of pleasure and connection. In the end she'd cared for him too much for that.

She remembers Margot confessing to her that she'd used Will in her first attempt at a child, sought him out and commiserated with him and allowed him to believe that she wanted him for himself and not for her own basic and basically duplicitous reproductive aims, sexless sex, a subliminally calculating means to an end which she'd told Alana she hadn't premeditated, hadn't planned... she'd just been flailing in the dark for any feeling, any possibility, of hope, and had blindly struck upon Will. A fellow resentful victim in all his thorny, vulnerable, plaid-patterned glory. Remembers Margot admitting, quietly, that she hadn't regretted it, despite Will's initial bitterness, his buried hurt. She only mourned her unborn baby's disturbing, drawn-out death and all the other obscene injuries she'd suffered to appease Mason's bottomless hunger to bring her under his control, to glut himself on her humiliation and pain.

Would that spontaneous deceit, that formlessly conceived falsehood, sex with undisclosed motivations lurking beyond the heaving flesh of the physical, be considered rape?

And if not— for it truly, _literally_ wasn't, or it _was_ only insofar as one would care to philosophically dabble in false equivalencies, comparing the subterfuge of identity to that of the body to that of motivation, all irrespective of context— then what was to be made of the wrong Hannibal had committed against Alana? Was it fucking nothing? Harmless? Forgivable?

What the _fuck_ was Will thinking, opening either his heart or his legs or, as was apparent, fucking _both_ to such a man when such tragic travesties lay between... between her and him, between _him_ and him? What the _fuck._

She shies away from this convoluted mire of remorse and desire and disgust and refocuses on Will, here in the present, standing steadfast as Hannibal's willing human shield, the angle of his shoulders canted like even now he's feeling a solacing pull, like Hannibal is his center of gravity, like they're celestial bodies caught in the spiraling wells of each others' influence. He holds himself, Alana realizes, as she holds herself around Margot.

He's watching her. Guileless yet unreadable as he ever is. Drinking in all her secrets, her shames and her horrors, following her train of thought and passively observing the glimpses which can be caught through every flashing window on every passing railway car and then reflecting it all back.

He opens his mouth, eyes fixed on hers, and begins his sentence with a calm and weary sigh which breaks into a smooth, solid monotone as shale cleaves from a sheer rock face, the scales of slate clattering far below. “I wanted to see you, and... your son. Morgan, isn't it?”

They stare at him. Margot has gone glacially hostile with alarm, beginning again to quiver with a rigidly contained tempest of enormous emotion, but Alana feels as though the pool of Will's stillness has expanded to envelope her, and looking into his shadowed eyes across the room it is as though, in this moment and this alone, she, too, can so deftly divine others' truths.

In him she sees only wistfulness and honesty, agonized as all Will's emotions are agonized, a smothered, hollow miscarriage of an experience which overtakes him and sends him stumbling to in turn take over his own apathy with some bereft approximation of motivation. He would be an utterly static being without this ouroboros of dispossession, even interspersed as it is with occasional eye-for-an-eye surges of spite, and it makes an odd sort of sense that, eventually, his cyclical evolution would have circled him back to this particular aspect of his past, back to Alana and Margot and his nascent parental longing. Back to the ever-elusive concept of family.

The problem with this odd little quest of his is that there's something he's still left unsaid, another layer lying obscured beneath his too-concise explanation, and, additionally and of greater importance, that he's chosen _Alana's family_ to fixate on, and has swept an indulgent serial killer with a penchant for grudges along with him.

“Why can't you and Hannibal adopt?” she quips, because really now. If they'd just deigned to pick up some homeless orphan off of the street and contented themselves with sending a nice postcard in Hannibal's distinctively elegant handwriting then all of this could have been avoided.

Someone might still fucking die.

“We presently have a nomadic and occasionally risky lifestyle not suited to the needs of a growing child,” Hannibal says, all chidingly aloof disapproval. “Additionally, Will very much wished to see how you and your lovely wife were getting along since you elected to set aside your distinguished position at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

“I was also reminded of missing you when we streamed your TED Talk,” says Will diffidently.

“You made some incisive points on sexism and victim blaming in media coverage. I especially appreciated your foray into widespread sensationalism and romanticization of trauma and abuse, and the direct harm these normalized portrayals subsequently cause to individual victims. An excellently urgent, humanizing delivery,” Hannibal commends her. “Although there could have been more time allocated to the discussion such detrimental cultural influences play in supposedly unbiased news reporting.”

“We wanted you to rail CNN for bringing on Lounds' tabloid-trash ass as an expert consultant,” Will translates. “He also liked your aubergine pantsuit. Said it was of 'exquisite tailoring' and that he happened to have 'an especial partiality for the color.'”

Margot, infinitesimally less uneasy given Alana's confident flippancy and the ensuing redirection of Hannibal and Will's attention towards Alana, rolls her eyes.

Alana is never doing another TED Talk again.

“What is it you want to accomplish out of seeing us?” she presses. “Out of seeing our son.” A protective finality is contained within her use of the possessive.

“Does everything have to be an accomplishment?” Will asks.

“If you're here to _take him,_ or to _hurt her,_ then by God either you'll tell me now or I'll find out anyways and I. _Will._ Kill. You,” Margot snarls, sudden and savage.

Hannibal is leaning precariously to the side, trying to frown at her from around Will's torso. The ropes and the chair strain audibly, a drawn-out, preposterous creaking which increases petulantly as he tips further over. Margot twitches the barrel of the gun towards him, causing Will to notice and wave Hannibal fully back behind him. Hannibal rights himself with an aggrieved air, trying to catch Alana's eye so as to beg her sympathy or something else which would be completely and horrendously out of the question. Alana ignores him. The aggrieved aura strengthens.

“He was messing with you,” Will says, and it takes a moment for Alana to hear what he's said, to realize he's said it to her. For her to process what this might mean. “He never outright promised to kill you. Just implied it, let you jump to conclusions. That's also why I wanted to do this in person, and why it had to be _you_ we came for, _your_ family. So you'd know we meant it. We're going to leave, and leave you alive. All of you. You'll make it out of this alive, Alana.”

“Provided everybody continues to treat each other with civility,” Hannibal amends facetiously, and Will actually swivels halfway around to smack Hannibal's shoulder with the back of his hand.

“Not funny,” Will scolds, very firmly and without hope.

Hannibal shrugs, unfazed.

“Do you believe him?” Margot asks her. Leaving the final call up to her judgment.

It makes sense, now, with all the pieces revealed and in place. It was a confluence of reasons which led them here, not just Will's paternal pangs and any vestiges of fondness he'd once held for Alana, for either of them, but also his sense of restitution, his distaste for leaving others to labor under the burden of such a misapprehension. Especially since they are parents, with a child whom they cherish and who would be harmed by their deaths.

She's not certain how Hannibal could have been convinced to tell them, or even if he had not, in fact, been planning to enact violence upon her before Will was able to change his mind. Both possibilities align with Hannibal's dear love of playing with people, dropping them like rats into a maze to see which path they'd take. He has nothing so great to lose by letting Alana live. He would gain Will and Margot's regard, Margot's specifically meaning that she would not then bring all of the vast Verger resources bearing down on Hannibal's head in vengeance, and Hannibal would not have to kill Margot, whom he harbors no ill will towards, to prevent such.

For her part Alana has never treated Hannibal poorly or, god forbid, rudely. Not before she knew, and not after; and though she'd allied herself with Mason to drag Hannibal all the way back into the states and to justice, Margot, the necessary killing of Mason, had superseded all of that, and she had let Hannibal go in its favor. It was Hannibal who had given himself up to the law, and therefore to the BSHCI, which Alana had run with nothing less than professionalism, giving him a lavishly comfortable, even a privileged environment, magazine subscriptions and mail correspondence and phone calls, softcover books and felt-tipped markers and graphite and crayons, loose sketch paper and even fine ingredients and plastic cookware at times, and she had only ever taken it all away when he had transgressed in some distinct, tangible manner, when he was withholding information, or sending a murderer to darken the Foster-Grahams' door.

There was little respect possible to accord in such a setting as the hospital, unavoidable, clinical indignities par for the course for the incarcerated, but she'd still gone out of her way to provide him his due, taken pains to remove her own petty anger out of any equation used to calculate his care and treatment. Even if she _had_ at times allowed herself the satisfaction of condescension, of a brand akin to that which she'd been subjected to by him, the type she'd once seen as suggestions of common sense and leniency, as how he'd urged her to forgive Will's deluded proclamations of innocence in the face of his seemingly incontrovertible guilt, the way he'd said _“Don't be brave, Alana,”_ after having already taken the bullets from her gun. A courteous façade of agency.

She thinks for a moment that it is this kind of façade, this kind of lie, which is being presented to her now. Just another illusion, misdirection to hide the knife coming for her back.

Except: this is Will saying this, Will's doing. Will's design.

He knocked Hannibal out so they could tie him up, and they accepted this immediately and unquestioningly as an honest action, as something he would do and which they could go along with; even if it was merely a tactic to assuage their hostility it had been a move which prioritized their concerns over Hannibal's short-term wellfare.

He is untrustworthy, and far from innocent. She's allowed hurt to befall him, has in the past failed him both inadvertently and deliberately. There is no real way to know that he won't decide to withdraw his mercy, or whether he is already so changed that he has none now, no way to know that he won't ever betray her as others have.

And yet. It was not for Margot alone that she loosed Hannibal upon Muskrat Farm, and while Will is not one to keep a lasting account of slights and debts, he has never met kindness with cruelty. Even corrupted as he is, as they all are, he has his shred of decency; he is not a man who would make a widow of her wife nor an orphan of her son. He can't be.

Faith is such a pernicious, vicious thing.

“I believe him,” Alana says.

It is a time before Margot releases a long, steadying breath, before she looks over, studying Alana's face, her posture, looks back at Will, staring her down in all his defensive earnestness. She speaks into the silence, to Alana. “I trust you.”

She lowers the gun.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Margot is attuned to the cold frequency of finely honed steel in the way Alana is related to the riotous explosions of wildflowers which grow from the ashes of forest fires. She can't help but notice knives. It is for this reason she sees Will's sleight of hand with the match and his breast pocket, how he exchanges it for a little Swiss army blade in the contrasting, wavering layers of warmth and gloom of the dining room, the walls all scalloped with a dim wash of amber candlelight and defaced by the long screaming trails of all their grotesque shadows, monstrously ungainly limbs and warped profiles and wire-haze hair struggling to crawl away from their material points of origination.

It is the smart move, precisely as he compliments them for theirs, but she lets him keep it on him, not so much a hidden contingency as a comfort. She is the one with the gun, after all.

This becomes a mantra throughout the entire encounter, even after she lowers it: _I have the gun. I have the gun._

And yet little salamander-shy silver knives still scare her down to her marrow. She has tasted too often of their sting, little slices meant to gauge if the fat had yet been burnt by stress straight out of her.

Fetching Morgan here to meet them now is out of the question, not with him so frightened and his mothers' safety so uninsured. Another, separate meeting must be arranged, for trust only goes so far.

They arrive at an understanding, and decide loosely upon a time and place; three days from now, in Barcelona. Alana recites the number for her personal phone so that they may call at twelve o'clock the preceding day and receive her finalized instructions for the rendezvous, throwing it out with confident swiftness, the string of numbers caught easily in the nets of both Will and Hannibal's eidetic memories. Then Will slips Hannibal loose and they leave without looking back, slinking and unafraid like street-smart city coyotes trotting along the edges of their territory, making a lazy u-turn for its heart.

Margot expects Will to cut Hannibal free, reveal his cheat card then, but he is modest, _secretive,_ to the end. Finds the tricks to the knots and doesn't waste any length of their good silk rope. Leaves it coiled around the chair legs like a pile of slender, glossy black snakes.

Alana waits to hear the door shut before she is lunging into a run again, slower than previously, a pained, graceless stagger bringing her full-tilt to the bedroom. Margot is barely able to keep herself hanging back at Alana's heels as a rearguard just in case, a last glance cast down the hallway as she follows rapidly in Alana's scattered footsteps.

Had Alana left tracks Margot would have taken them for a mortally wounded animal's, would have checked for blood and spoor, but instead there is the dark satiny wave of Alana's bobbed hair so close before her she feels the phantom heat of it, and it is a shock to look down upon the pale flash of Alana's leg, the curve of her calf and the kicked-up heel of her bare foot, every bit of her whole and unharmed and human. The fair, fleet white doe of horrific fairy tales trapped and convulsing within her ungainly mortal form. Hunted.

Morgan and Alana practically fall into each other the moment the safe room door is open, Morgan sobbing in ruthlessly contained, hiccuping gasps, Alana letting loose a high, single note of what may be either hurt or relief or both as she grabs him tightly and collapses to the lush carpet amidst displaced designer shoes and hangars lined with antler-thick velvet, her cry carrying like a struck bell's.

Margot slams and locks the bedroom door the moment she's inside. It is only once she does so that she can feel her own body again, that it feels like her own flesh and blood and not some alien entity thrumming like a plucked bowstring a little to her left.

Morgan finds Margot over Alana's shoulder and watches her with bereft bewilderment, his huge, gleaming eyes streaming tears down his cheeks, until she, too, is drawn down, kneels at their sides and folds them close in her arms. They feel too expansive, all odd angles and surges of breath. She's afraid of not being able to hold on until Alana's strong hand finds hers and clenches until the shaking is crushed from it, driven from the framework of cartilage and bone until all that is left is connection and the flighty heartbeat of their little boy pressed safe between them.

 

~~~

 

They leave as dawn breaks, flooding like pastel watercolors over the rolling patchwork hills of golf-course-grass lawns and seemingly infinite stretches of olive orchards striped with neat rows of bushy, scrubby trees rooted firm in the hard tan dirt, daylight sweeping past the hazy brown crags of the low mountains ringing the horizon and the picturesque interruptions of other decadently understated villas interspersed here and there to become caught like silver echoes of starlight in the spiderwebs hidden amongst the fine, dense needles of the tall, narrow Mediterranean cypresses which line the villa's drive as proudly as evergreen soldiers at attention, a precise shadow picked out from every rough, chalk-white pebble of the limestone gravel which crunches underfoot as the three Verger-Blooms, ushered by the replacement security team, make a single trip to the very newly acquired and reasonably inconspicuous hybrid car, postures ducked and steps quick as those of fleeing fugitives'.

Margot covers Morgan's eyes to keep him from seeing the lithely sprawled corpse of one of the bodyguards laid out face-down beneath the softly rustling stripe of shade from a cypress, the back of his neat brunet comb-over blackened and clumped with dried blood, the white gravel beneath stained a rusty brown and studded with buzzing, iridescent flies, fine strands of dry hair fluttering weakly every now and then in the breeze. Alana has to tug at Applesauce's leash to discourage her from sniffing at the body but one of the flies darts greedily for the moist brown tracks of mineral stains leading to her tear ducts and when she snaps at it she catches it, cracks it in her teeth.

The imprint of violence upon the place feels different here than in Maryland. There, it was a dank, oppressive, pettily personal thing, an ugly, foreign grudge forced into perverted being like an alternate reality made manifest, fresh enough for the strong scents of coppery rot and dung to have soaked into the rich loam fit to feed the ravenous hunger of limber shoots of green. It had the tang of sugarcane and tobacco colonialism, of an indigenous timeline severed and left without cauterization, the meaninglessness of rampant, arrogant immediacy lively and self-destructive enough to turn upon itself and fester like an infected sore. Whereas the Old World smells, so tiredly as to be sterile-clean, of the vine and fig, sovereign history marching in a jagged but uninterrupted line of cherished local blood feuds and holy wars back beyond the gunpowder stench of trenches or the sun-warmed imports of Damascus steel, back beyond beaten bronze, and further, to the paleolithic arts of knapped chert and red ocher and newfound flame, pages of parchment records stacked up and folded over each other and compressed like geologic layers, packed and worn and retread until only clay and dust remains to mark it. A dry, sweeping stagnation of an ending, rather than a close wet one.

She feels oddly divorced from this land. The soul of it is too wide and indifferent, too established, to invoke within her any sense of tragedy. What impact does a single drop of blood have upon a desert of tradition so parched it has swallowed an entire ocean?

The villa and the adjacent stables, the high walls and cast-iron gates, the calculatedly rustic whitewashed walls and orange barrel-tiled roof and the dark, secretive gaze of the house's large, modern-style, mirrored and bulletproof windows, all shrink quickly behind them, eaten in chunks by the sere landscape encroaching around the many twists and bends of the provincial road as Margot pulls the car sedately away, mindful of the potholes, the buttery leather of the steering wheel slipping easily beneath her grip and the cleaning crew just beginning to swarm the courtyard before she adjusts her rearview and in this manner dismisses it all from sight.

 

~~~

 

The second time Margot ever saw Alana, Alana had knocked on the door to her bedroom very early in the morning, pressed and primped and tightly collected, and she'd been carrying a little gift bag, stiff, obsidian-black laminated paper with snowy white tissues stuffed in between the soft cloth cord handles to hide whatever was within. It took a moment for Margot to notice it after she'd opened the door and seen Mason's new expert on Hannibal Lecter standing there, in part because Alana had held the bag low and a little behind her thigh, hesitant in a way which belied her cool poise and the flirtatiously coy, warm curve of her vermilion lips, the tender, hungry hope in her steady, understanding gaze.

Alana had blinked, subtly flustered, to see Margot clad only in her gold silk dressing gown, her nipples dimpling the sleek fall of the shining metallic cloth. Alana's blush had not shown beneath her makeup but Margot, face bare, knew that hers did, the clammy pallor of resigned, sickly dread melting into the flush of embarrassingly vulnerable, carnal longing, and she raised her chin to meet Alana's eyes, refusing to be ashamed.

It would not have been better to admit that she'd thought the smart rap on her door was one of Mason's men having come to fetch her to his side, and that she opened her private quarters at a knock no matter what state of dress she found herself in because she always must, immediately and uncomplainingly, lest she give the impression of hiding something, of being intransigent or ungrateful. Lest she invite rebuke. Punishment.

It would have been inappropriate, the height of folly at that juncture, to admit to this stranger that not so long ago a knock on her door meant Mason himself, and that he became nasty should she ever fail to promptly meet him and welcome him, be it wet from the shower or dragging the cobwebs of fitful sleep; he usually wasted no time in stripping her anyways, eager to press bruises into naked flesh trembling with compliant fear.

Although the worst, most personal of her terrors and his deviant pleasures was impotent, then, gone soft and gnarled in his confinement to a wheelchair, she was under no illusion of safety. Every day was merely another chance for him to find other ways of defiling her, fueled by the same old unpredictable spates of spite now distilled into the intense, patient burn of a jealous desire to bring her down as low in spirit as he had been in body, to leave her mauled and sullied and beaten so far into the mud of hopelessness that she choked on it as she once had around his cock.

She did not mean to allow him.

But then, she never did.

“I was told I could find you here, and I apologize for the intrusion,” Alana had said, shifting her weight heavily against her cane. The hand with the gift bag twitched before she lifted it up to proffer it, her nails gleaming a flawless, polished scarlet, long enough that they'd be uncomfortable. “But I brought something for you. A thank-you present, if you will. For greeting me with such grace.”

Margot felt her face go stony at Dr. Bloom's choice of words, the unintentional hearkening to Mason's occasional emphasis on allowances and incentives, the supposed debts she owed him, the gratitude he continually tried to pry from her. The chocolate bars, melted in his pants pocket and tossed her way as an afterthought once he'd done up his zipper. But she softened again as she considered the tentative delicacy with which Alana held the bag, the circumspect distance she was keeping and the demure care she took to avoid ogling Margot's breasts. Just an innocuous coincidence, an unpleasant, longstanding prior association.

“I appreciate it,” Margot said, and watched the darker, grudging meaning sail right over Alana's head.

It was refreshing. And... reassuring, to have someone who looked at her with such innocent, egalitarian lust venture from neutral meeting spaces, spaces Margot had gone to such lengths to reach so as to arrange her trysts, and deep into the treacheries of her “home” turf. Dr. Bloom struck Margot as someone driven by a terrible, vengeful courage. But someone, also, who was new as a butterfly still soaked from the chrysalis to the cutthroat business of selfish, grisly schemes.

She wondered if Dr. Bloom's interests could be persuaded, either through logic, pity, or through more subversively intimate means, to overlap with Margot's. If some of her courage might in any way lend itself to carrying into reality the fanciful notion of a white knighthood.

If there was any way to protect her, should her eager inexperience lead her too far. Anywhere too close to the pits in which Margot and her battered, infected ilk resided.

At any rate, Bloom was intelligent, thoughtful, and beautiful, and clearly as attracted to Margot as Margot was to her. If not an initial alliance, or even a romance, then at the very least the risk of a purely physical liaison could be afforded at the outset, and further confidences later imparted if Bloom should then prove as discreet and sympathetic as she appeared.

Alana's cultured, close-lipped smile crept wider when Margot let her fingers brush against hers in accepting the present, and she wished Margot well with such chivalry that she half expected her to give a little bow of farewell as the door drifted closed.

Beneath the foamy clouds of rustling diaphanous tissue paper Margot found a plain card of thick, creamy stock marked only with a blood-red lipstick kiss, and a little cut-glass bottle of amber perfume, cradled within like a topaz egg in a bird's nest. She dabbed it on her wrist to test it and found it redolent with cinnamon and musk, the sharp, smoky earthiness balanced by a clean, sweet note of orange blossom. Precisely the sort of fragrance Margot favored. How Alana had known to select it was anyone's guess.

She placed it on her dresser where it would catch the light, facets sparkling as she rotated it to admire the liquid's rich, lucent glow, and she was wearing a touch of it behind each ear the next time they saw each other. For some reason her stomach fluttered when Alana caught the scent and her eyes flashed to Margot's, brimming with such blatant, searching wonder that Margot had wanted to laugh, to remind Alana that _she_ had been the one, in all her earlier suave confidence, to instigate this.

The first time they'd kissed, Margot's mouth was flavored with the cinnamon heat of the hard candies she'd eaten in advance to match, and she'd nipped and nibbled cleverly at Alana's painted lips until they had tasted almost as bloody as they'd looked, iron melding with spice and wax, and Alana had broken away to gasp as if drowning, had nuzzled her nose into the hollow beneath Margot's ear and had breathed her in with deep, desperate, starving gulps of air, had sucked at the pulse in Margot's throat until Margot was squirming and she _had_ laughed, then, ticklishness and astonished pleasure and a sudden surge of affection crashing over her in an unexpected wave of buzzing, euphoric sensation and she'd realized, very clearly, that just as she would find a way to rid herself of Mason she would also do everything in her power to stay with this marvelous, perfect, unparalleled woman, would devote her stubborn, paltry life to her, would try her damnedest to share with her even a fraction of the indescribable joy which she had evoked within Margot as easily and inexorably as a sunrise after a long, dark night.

“Will you help me?” she'd asked, and Alana had said... _yes._

 

~~~

 

They have their suitcases in the trunk, Morgan in a carseat in the back and Applesauce perched loose beside him, enough food and water to make it several hours straight before Morgan is swinging his legs and kicking Margot's seat out of boredom, Alana is grimacing in grim pain despite having lowered her seat down almost as far as it would go so as to try and stretch her back, and Applesauce has begun to whine fretfully and twist to look out of each window with increasing unrest, the tags on her monogrammed collar rattling.

Every now and then she puts her paw up near the cup holders between the front seats and starts forward as if to stand, or as if to try and climb bodily into Alana's lap, especially whenever Alana winces at the occasional bump in the road and awkwardly digs an arm under herself to massage her spine, but each time a chiding word or gesture or look sends Applesauce gathering herself abashedly back, ears drooping in mournful but impeccable obedience despite her pent-up energy. She should really be in the crate but she's well-behaved enough and Morgan was clingy enough that this option had seemed best.

Margot, for her part, is feeling her buttocks slowly die a numb, cramped death in their too-cushioned, too-stationary prison, and finds herself longing with great intensity for the exertion of the saddle. She reaches over to turn on the radio and flicks through the stations in search of a channel other than pop music, news, or static to distract them all from their misery. There is nothing to be found.

The car has a CD player, but, alas, they left their electronica disc behind and have naught to put in it to play. For some reason the inclusion of their preferred tunes simply hadn't made it very high on their list of priorities when packing on such short notice.

The car is very quiet when she turns the radio back off, her hearing long since accustomed to the blasting AC and the full, dull frequency of the engine and the hum of the concrete passing endlessly under the fresh rubber treads of the wheels. Morgan's toes pat against the seat back, the soft drum of the impacts carrying over only faintly, but endlessly; one-two. One-two. Applesauce's tags chime and her fur rustles against the leather as she shifts. She opens her mouth, tongue lolling, and begins to pant, those deep, wet, relaxed dog-breath exhalations humidifying the artificially cool air and overtaking the new car smell.

“You know, I thought hell would smell more of brimstone and sulfur,” Margot remarks. In the rearview she sees Morgan's glazed eyes meander up from the mindless game he'd been listlessly tapping at on the phone screen. “Less of kibble and ass.”

“You said a bad word,” he observes, lethargic and judgmental, his whiny tone laden with all the tired grumpiness which Margot had schooled from her own.

“This isn't hell,” Alana murmurs. Her eyes are closed against the glare, a sharp wrinkle cut in between her brows. It's likely she'd been dozing for she certainly sounds half-asleep. “This is purgatory.”

It seems fair. They're in stasis as much as they are in transit. Counting down to the moment when they've decided to expose their greatest treasure to possible destruction. Waiting.

There's more than chance enough that the axe shall still fall, no matter Alana's faith in Will, and Margot's trust in her faith. Hannibal has a way of disrupting things, a way of goading itchy trigger fingers into letting loose the bullets, and all the rest of them will be on high alert, tensions strung taut, ripe for the sowing of discord and disaster.

Applesauce leans over and noses inquiringly at Alana's ear, a split second away from licking a broad, slimy swathe up the side of her face; Alana gives a full-body shudder and bats Applesauce away with an disgusted flap of her hand in the nick of time, eyes snapping open in indignant alarm before she recognizes the situation and calms into instant, frowning ruefulness, her head dropping back down against the headrest in quiet exhaustion. Morgan pets behind Applesauce's wide, floppy ears as if apologizing on Alana's behalf, his fingers sliding in straight, gentle strokes over her short fur, flattening rather than combing, and the dog gratefully turns and begins to lick enthusiastically at his cheek instead, finding him in a much more amenable state of consciousness to receive her affection.

Margot grimaces at the slobber but Morgan is busy being coaxed into laughter rather than kicking her chair, now, so she lets them be.

 

~~~

 

They grow numb to the passing of surroundings, transported ever forward in a capsule which feels hermetically sealed and separate from the outside world, fields and hills and craggy mountains, olive groves and vineyards and copses of wild trees, the myriad creeks and rivers wending down from the highlands, are all alike as they pass by, as Helios' chariot arcs gradually across the sky in predictably constant counterpoint to the twists and turns of their crawling progress on the mortal roads, the sunlight flashing on leaves and water and pushing the shadows around the radius of the compass rose about them. They are within it all, yes, but as separate as paper messages in a sealed glass bottle, a thick sheen of jade green glimmering at the same wavelength as the heat haze shimmering on the horizon.

They shake it off only occasionally, stopping the car several times throughout the trip to allow them all to stretch their legs. It is like surfacing from a submarine. Morgan and Applesauce are overjoyed every time, particularly with the first break, and Alana quietly but desperately relieved. Horse riding followed by the panicked frenzy of the break-in capped off by this endurance test of enforced motionlessness is all taking its toll on her body; she swallows two of her pain pills and breathes deeply before getting out of the car. Margot gives Morgan Applesauce's leash to hold but watches them closely as Applesauce tows Morgan after the skittering retreat of a lizard into the rocks and underbrush, intervening before the dog can thrust her muzzle into the cottony funnel web of a processionary caterpillar nest situated enticingly low in the needled branches of a pine and get a snout full of poisonous spines. Warns Morgan to stay nearby.

The gentle wind, weaker now than it was at dawn, smells of those flagrantly fragrant pines, as well as dust and ozone and persimmons. The faint burble of nearby running water is drowned by the buzzing bellow of a passenger airplane's escalating drone, too far overhead to make out on such a brilliantly clear day. Butterflies flicker about thickets of wildflowers going to seed in dainty flashes of pale color. She feels herself beginning to sweat in the heat, her blouse sticking to the small of her back and the insides of her bare thighs sliding damply against each other within the confines of her pencil skirt.

Margot lays out a blanket one of the picnic tables in the shade of a handsome fig tree, large and muscular with wide, twisting branches and full leaves glowing emerald, and helps Alana lay herself supine on it, dappled shadows cast over her face. She keeps her eyes open as she begins the wincingly slow flexing of her exercises, expression stony and distant as she looks heavenward. Margot can almost see the memory Alana sees, the bright shards of window glass raining about her in a deadly shroud. It is the same which comes over her every time. Every single time.

But it fades as Margot folds her blazer and edges it beneath Alana's head as a pillow, as her gaze comes back into focus and meets Margot's.

The fig towers above them as if reaching for heaven, the architectural map of it old and venerable as Eden. The broad, fluttering leaves and the thick, creaking, sinuous wood of it murmur a lullaby in a foreign language, the unfamiliar words drifting at the far edge of audibility. The serpent in the garden. Singing of forbidden temptations and luscious fruits. Knowledge as the ultimate pleasure, the ultimate corruption. Oh, what they would and would not give for the hedonistic consummation of an answer.

What they _are going_ to give, come Barcelona.

Margot brackets Alana's head with her arms, hands flat on either side of her face, bending sideways to hover straight above her. Alana's breathing stills for a moment, her pupils expanding as Margot stoops closer, her hair falling about Alana's face to frame them both in some illusorily private space, close and intimate and hushed with promise, their mouths not even inches apart. And then Margot darts up to kiss Alana's nose instead, a light peck of lips and a teasing smack of sound, and Alana is overtaken by bubbling mirth.

She's incomparably beautiful when she laughs. Mouth pressing together as if to smother it, stretching wide and parting in the corners before her teeth break through in a grin, her eyes a bright, crystalline blue and narrowed with the plumping of her cheeks. She even _snorts,_ her nose wrinkling adorably, eyes clenching shut on tears when she can no longer hold Margot's enraptured gaze. The moisture seeps into her lashes and sparkles over the shadowed bags beneath, her eyelids the most exquisite shade of delicately veined lilac, so fine as to be almost translucent when her face finally relaxes and the last fit of giggles ceases to hitch in her chest. She looks goofy and giddy and as far gone as Margot feels, and then eventually, simply, peaceful.

Margot cups Alana's face with one hand and leans down again until their foreheads touch, and just rests there for awhile. Rests as one with her.

They wait until Morgan and Applesauce have burnt off some of their energy before laying out their provisions on the table in place of Alana, making of their meal a picnic. Car-warm potato salad and protein bars and thermoses of sweet tea. Banana chips. A bag of sliced oat-nut bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly with which to make sandwiches. Plastic plates and utensils. It's almost a sort of revenge, to revel in such a prosaic American spread, to allow Morgan to sneak a bit of crust to Applesauce where she's tied to the table leg beside him. Let them be an ordinary family, for this moment unguarded, devoid of manners and style and aesthetic concerns.

“Why are we running away?” Morgan finally thinks to ask, as they pack their things up. “Are the people from last night coming for us?”

Alana and Margot share a look which carries within it a silent debate, and arrive at the same decision.

“We're going to meet someone in Barcelona,” Alana says. “A couple of... old friends.”

“The ones from last night,” Morgan surmises, with a terrifyingly guileless flash of insight, all childlike seriousness and laser attention flitting to the bob of Alana's throat as she swallows thickly and composes herself. She sways on her feet, her hand clenching around the head of her cane, the tip grinding into the dirt.

“Yes,” Alana says, and then her voice cracks and she says no more.

Morgan stares calmly, cocking his head like that of a curious bird's, and Margot has a sudden flash of chilling fear at the lack of the same in her son. A sense of déjà vu.

Mason.

She watches as Morgan reaches out to take Alana's free hand and squeeze it in reassurance, his so much smaller within hers.

“I'll protect you,” he swears, his head tipped back and practically alight with a madman's devotion as if pledging his oath to a queen and _when did he get so tall._

Margot snatches him into her arms and makes of it a joke, laughs and tickles his ribs and calls him Little Man until he laughs too and she tells him there is nothing to worry about, nothing at all because they're the ones protecting him, here, and doesn't he know that? And by these means she keeps him from glimpsing the terrible sadness in Alana's face.

They later come across a small herd of wild pigs as the sun is lowering, hairy and brown and oddly quiet. They roll the car to a stop and watch as the herd trots across the cracked gray tarmac before them, the half-grown piglets with their fading stripes hovering close to the scruffy sows. Small, neat cloven hooves clipping on the concrete, furry ears flicking at Applesauce's barking. The dull ivory of a boar's white tusk gleaming in the ruddy orange of the sunset's dying radiance.

 

~~~

 

She dreams of a sea of swine. It is a familiar nightmare, dimly lit with the scarlet of stockyard slaughterhouses, the huge, sleek backs of the hogs shining nude and pink as the inner curves of polished conch shells and howling with the same mystic shrieking masquerading as silence. Over-saturated solidity tricked into acting as vacuum. She is suspended by some unknown force above the squealing, milling crush, her bare feet dangling heavy below her, and with every eternal second her feet grow heavier, dragging her slowly but surely downwards.

She sees her feet as if from outside of herself, sometimes, unexpectedly switching between bodied and disembodied as if between camera angles. A surreal snuff film's prologue cobbled together under the lackadaisical oversight of a director pretentiously unconcerned with continuity. They are small and fine-boned and very white, her deep-set nails opalescently colorless, the branching veins running beneath the corpse-pallid skin like fat blue earthworms in burrows barely buried within chalky clay, the sharply defined bones and tendons fanning out towards the demure little roly-poly curls of her crooked toes in crone-prominent knife slashes. And my, what short, piggish little toes they are. One little piggy went to market, one little piggy made roast beef. Stayed home. Had none. Cried. Screamed. One screamed and screamed and screamed and it wouldn't stop fucking screaming why won't it just shut up why can't you just _shut the fuck up_ all the fucking way. Home.

_“Well we both know this goes easier if you're not hysterical, Margot, but by all means, don't hold back those delicious crocodile tears of yours on my account. Not from me.”_

And the weight of her feet gradually increases, pulling her down like a drowning person lashed to an anchor. She cannot move.

The pigs jostle, lifting up their cut-off snouts as if scenting truffles, flat noses and slanted slit-nostrils undulating, floppy triangle ears pricked and intelligent beady eyes fixing on the descending feast of her gristle and flesh in eager hunger. They've been so well trained. They hear the dog-whistle fear caged in her ribs, in her succulent sausage intestines and the ripe melon of her skull. They recognize on her the smell of the perfume their food has been doused with. Cinnamon and orange blossoms, weak against the musty stench of blood and shit and old barn. They open their soft, sensitive mouths and strain upwards with the wettest and pinkest of their wet pink selves, the ugly white of blunt omnivore's teeth still hidden in the voluptuously plump pockets of their cheeks despite the expectant gaping of their deceptively gentle, diffident rictuses, obsequiously greedy.

They are incubators for spare parts, for organs interchangeable with that of a human's. The humans they consume are interchangeable with that of their factory offal corn slop. Such adaptable creatures. Smart. Hardy. Cost-effective. Cannibalistic, if need be.

They all look precisely the same. The same animal, duplicated, triplicated, multiplied times a million and every single one of them is somehow waiting directly beneath her, poised to chew the meat from her tender belly and throat, thighs and underarms, so very ecstatically ready to work away at her with their gummy dentition as she struggles and wails, as her inedible components are indifferently trampled as waste into the thick mud and manure in the churning midst of the mob gleefully tearing her apart and eating her alive.

She shuts her eyes but still she feels their hot breath purling against the soles of her feet. Closer. Closer still, a dewy puff of musky moisture, a ticklish phantom brush of some slick and tender proboscis probing curiously against her callouses. The dread pounding in her pulse, her eardrums almost bursting with the pressure of it and her heart expanding in mortal concert. Her entire body converted into the screams she's long since learned to hold within. A salty drop of sweat dripping all along the back of her leg, down her calf, circling the knobby joint of her ankle to her heel, crawling along the arch of her foot, wandering excruciatingly to the very tip of her big toe where _it is licked from her skin by a scalding, bestial tongue._

And Margot wakes.

She lies paralyzed for a long time though she comes to consciousness all at once. Even before reality trickles in to contradict the nightmare assurances of her id she is cataloging every revelation of her surroundings as each comes to her, one by one. She is in a Barcelona hotel, in bed, the room cool beyond the cotton sheets and feather comforter. Alana is by her side, Morgan and Applesauce in the adjacent room in their suite. All is calm. Safe.

Margot slips from their bed to look in on their son anyways, finds him whole and well and quiet. She checks the doors, the balcony. All locked. Only then does she go to her bag of toiletries, finds the perfume bottle which she'd packed as an essential by touch and holds it so tightly in her hand as to press imprints of its angular shape into her palm. When she spritzes some onto her wrist its comforting aroma is as strong and bright and pure as ever. As it was when Alana first gifted it to her, and as it has been every time since then, for Alana purchases her a fresh vial every year on their anniversary.

She goes back to bed and lies curved on her side like a comma, like the fetus which was once extracted from her, a half-formed stopgap of a thing, her hands up on the pillow beside her face in loose fists so that she does not lose the perfume's scent.

Alana mumbles something incomprehensible and rolls to spoon her though it is not as easy a position on her spine, seamlessly cleaving them together. She fits her arm into place below Margot's and her breasts press against Margot's shoulders, her human body warm and heavy and real, every corporeal contour of her dearly familiar. Her face is buried in Margot's hair, her breath creating a patch of heat in the dip at the base of Margot's skull and flowing slow enough that Margot believes her asleep before she rouses herself to utter Margot's name in a plaintive query, muffled against the nape of Margot's neck but otherwise as startlingly clearly enunciated as if it had been taken directly as an untampered snippet from her daytime speech in a minor but miraculous transposition of time, the fabric of chronological events folded over itself and pierced through to meet in this one specific place as if pricked with an embroidery pin.

“I'm all right,” Margot answers, and with a sigh Alana settles back into her slumber, soothed.

 

~~~

 

It's a surprisingly excellent hotel for one with bookings available on short notice and no prohibition against their guests keeping pets in their rooms. Foremost amongst its virtues, at least in Morgan's opinion, is that it is equipped with an outdoor swimming pool, situated in a terracotta-tiled courtyard and cooled by a shady border of neatly kept hedges and lemon trees, their slim trunks painted white to protect their bark against the sun. Morgan compares the paint to his sunblock, slathering a wide streak onto his arm and studying the creaminess of the hues side by side before his can soak into his skin and fade away. His brown hair has been ruffled into flyaway cowlicks following the eager removal of his t-shirt, his body only just beginning to hint at the lankiness of adolescence. He looks like a fragile little alabaster gargoyle unconventionally clad in swimwear, crouched there next to the lemon, holding his arm up parallel to it so that his spread hand recalls the branches.

“Make sure to cover the tips of your ears,” Margot reminds him, as Alana's setting their stack of towels onto the flat, overlong foot of a slatted cedar lounge chair located far out of the possible splash zone.

“All right,” he calls dutifully, without turning around.

“And the bridge of your nose.” He's inherited the downright burnable flimsiness of Alana's complexion, aggressively averse to either tanning or freckling. Margot's tempted to be half as worried about skin cancer threatening her family as she is about the probability of various deranged murderers coming out of the woodwork of Alana and Margot's past.

“I will,” he says.

From an adjacent chair another young mother in a cheerful hibiscus-patterned one-piece catches Margot's eye so as to smile at her in affable sympathy, her own kids and husband busy playing a boisterous round of Marco Polo in the pool. “They're tough at that age, aren't they?”

Margot does a double-take between them in bewilderment; Morgan is even now dabbing sunblock onto his ears.

The woman's smile widens, encouragingly inviting response. Margot considers ignoring her but some twisted concession to politeness wins out, though her reply is less casual and far more scathing than she'd intended. “I think children are always tough. If you're not tearing yourself up for fear of fucking their lives over then I don't know what you'd be doing. The wrong thing, probably.”

The woman blinks several times in rapid succession, but to her accursed credit her expression remains nearly as friendly as before. “Hah, yeah, I guess,” she says dubiously, her tone conveying the most mild and infuriating form of urbane disagreement. “So what's his name?”

“Morgan.”

“Is this your first vacation here?”

“No.”

“You spend all your time in Barcelona, huh? How lovely. It's enough to make me jealous.”

“We rent a villa in the country.”

“Oh, wow! So why are you here at a hotel, then?” the woman asks, still vainly trying to wheedle inoffensive conversation out of her.

“It's too long a story,” Margot announces flatly. Alana casts Margot a much more genuine look of sympathy than the woman's had been as she stretches herself out onto the lounge chair above the towels, though Margot reproachfully tweaks her toe at the flicker of schadenfreude which chases it upon Margot's dismay at the hapless woman once more opening her mouth to make another desperate stab at socialization.

“Oh,” she says, absently following Margot's touch to Alana's foot with the light haze of heterosexual obliviousness glazing her eyes. “That's fine, then. I hope you and your sister are having a nice time.”

Alana laughs, not entirely without derision, and finally speaks up with a wave of her hand, her gold wedding band glinting as she gestures between Margot and herself. “We're married, actually.”

Margot catches Alana's hand and squeezes it, the matching ring on her own finger on prominent display, and allows Alana to draw her down to sit beside her.

The hibiscus woman's jaw drops in self-directed horror, her face blotching as bright a red as the flowers on her swimsuit in mortification. It takes her a few seconds of gaping before she manages a choked apology, and then she hastens to repeat herself with unnecessary fervor. “I'm sorry, my God, I am _so sorry,_ oh my God. Sorry.”

“It's nothing. Forget about it,” Margot cuts her off curtly, and the woman nods and looks away.

Alana begins to spread sunblock over her legs and Margot sets about helping, steeling herself against the surreptitious gawking and focusing on the pleasantly slick glide of Alana's calves and thighs beneath her hands, the ridge of her shin and the rough patch of skin over the knob of her kneecap. She feels unable to resist making of it some minor claim of ownership, a show of possessiveness, but she keeps her hands chaste anyways. It isn't worth being so bitterly proprietary over.

Shortly thereafter one of the woman's children throws a tantrum and gives her an excuse to hustle the rest of her family off in shame.

“You all right?” Alana asks, sitting up so as to catch Margot around the back of the neck to gain her attention, pulling them a bit closer together so Alana can peer into her eyes in concern.

“I won't say it doesn't bother me,” Margot says.

“The assumption that everyone is always straight until explicitly proven otherwise, or strangers trying to strike up boring conversation with you?”

“Both?” Margot offers with a huff. “But. Mostly I can't abide that other people feel like they own some part of you on sight. That they can help themselves to your time and your emotional energy and make assumptions about you and apply those assumptions to their interactions with you without even the slightest amount of consideration or self-reflection.”

“All of us trapped in that semi-forced feedback loop of mundanely misinformed, presumptive behavior. Already all plotted out,” Alana says.

“Some more fucking trapped than others,” says Margot. “I _despise_ meeting new people.”

“Next time I'll be sure to just shove them into the pool to save you,” Alana promises solemnly.

“And they say romance is dead.”

Morgan has ended up beneath the line of shower spouts and is diligently following the instructions of the posted signs imploring swimmers to rinse off before entering the pool, the freshwater spray forming a conical curtain of glimmering diamond drops illuminated by the sunlight, pattering like cheaper, thicker flecks of white quartz off his back as he turns around and around, his eyes tightly closed, his nostrils pinched shut with his hand. His hair is now waterlogged dark, plastered flat over his head, and his ribs press out in his skinny chest, inflated with held breath.

Alana calls, “Going in?” as soon as he switches the shower off and blinks his eyes open again, immediately looking to his mothers by force of habit.

He grins and bounces on his toes, yelling out his response: “Yup! Don't take too long!” With a lurching skip he makes for the steps of the shallow end and wades in, his feet first slapping as they breach the surface of the water and then drowned into slowness and silence, its sparkling, saturated azure bleaching his submerged body to something sickly and off-color, a dream-color. When he's walked in far enough for the air to have begun belling his swim shorts he plugs his nose again, flattens his body, and jumps into an amateurish dive, dipping headfirst into the insignificant depths and arrowing forwards like a frog to pop up ungracefully only a few moments later, his hands coming up to paddle and his legs crooked knees-out beneath himself to keep them from touching the bottom. The gaps between his front teeth show as he smiles at Alana and Margot, already spitting a bit for breath.

“Impressive!” Alana praises, much to Morgan's delight and immediate, charmingly unsuccessful efforts towards duplicating the maneuver.

“You head in before me,” Margot says to Alana. “I feel like staying here for a while.”

Alana reaches for Margot's shoulder and clasps it fondly before she rises from the chair and follows Morgan. Margot slides into her vacated place on the sun-baked planks and watches as Alana plays for a time with Morgan before later passing alone into the deep end, her underwater movements made into ponderously slow-motion grace, supporting her so that when up to her neck she barely needs even touch her feet to the tiles, the obvious traces and trials of her disability practically disappearing in the insidiously forgiving foreign element in which she is safely engulfed. Ripples of light dance in warped stripes over her aqua-washed body as she tips herself back into a float, knees and elbows and wrists lifting up from the pool in turn to sway like bashful lilies, their waxy petals beaded with water. The full, feathery billow of her immersed hair drifts outwards into a voluminous, incomparably hazy cloud, haloing the perfect marble island of her face like an oil-slick. Her water-blackened tresses serving as a bit of midnight, this time transplanted into the day.

 

 

 

 


End file.
